Theme: One-Room Schoolhouses
“Victoria School” Photo by Daryl Mitchell, used by permission under a Creative Commons license.
Pictured above is a building that was Saskatoon's first school, built in 1887. Originally at the corner of 12th Street and Broadway Avenue, it was moved to the University of Saskatchewan campus in 1911. It was one room for all grades.
While the play Schoolhouse is set in Ontario, there used to be thousands of one-room schoolhouses all over Canada, including in Saskatchewan—and you can still find the buildings around the province. Some have been turned into museum sites, some are being used for other things, and some just sit on the prairie, as if waiting for schoolchildren to come back from long holidays.
Photos of one-room schools in Saskatchewan: http://sk.canadagenweb.org/school/gallery.html
(The following is adapted from Rosella Mitchell's entry on “One-room school” in the Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan)
The first one-room schools in Saskatchewan began, in the mid-19th century, when a community had enough children to qualify for a grant for a school. After receiving the necessary government approvals, they selected a place to build. The rules were that the school has to be far from open water, on high dry land, but where grass would grow well. And it had to be somewhere central in the community, so kids could get there easily.
The people in the community built the school. Some schools were built of local stone, some of sod (wide strips of grass growing in dirt) or mud, and others of logs or lumber; some were even assembled on site using “school kits” that were mail-ordered from a department store. The school generally had 15 square feet (1.4 square metres) per student, an 11-foot (3.4 metre) ceiling, and windows to the left; there would also be a smaller cloak or mud room, with hooks for outdoor clothes, a stand for a washbasin, and shelves for the lunch buckets. The typical schoolroom had a blackboard at the front, some shelves under the windows for textbooks, a teacher’s desk and chair at the front of the room, and a pot-bellied stove near the centre or at the back, a big one, with a long pipe to put the most heat into the room. There were single or double desks for the students. The teacher or students were responsible for building the fire in the morning and cleaning stovepipes regularly; which was often cold, hard work. Drinking water in the early schools usually came from a pail and a dipper, or a big stone crock with a spigot. Either would have to be filled by a student or the teacher by drawing water from a well.
Inside Victoria School, Photo by Daryl Mitchell, used under a Creative Commons license.
The teachers in these schools were usually women, some who had taken teacher training, others with only a Grade 8 education. In the early years, teachers boarded with families in the community, travelling to school with some of their students. Many of these women found partners in the community and stayed on as wives and mothers. The teachers did not have job security, and did not always get paid regularly, especially during the Depression. Turnover was high, the average being a new teacher every year.
Check out this film vignette about the teachers, who were often young women, who worked in these schools:
http://www.histori.ca/minutes/minute.do?id=10183
A typical school had fifteen students in six grades; but enrolment could go as high as fifty, with eight or even 10 grades. School was often a welcome break from farm work at home, and it was sometimes hard to get parents to send older children, who were expected to work like adults. The emphasis for all grades was on reading, writing and arithmetic.
Click on photo for larger version: Children in an American one-room schoolhouse, October, 1940. Breathitt County, Kentucky. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration, Mary Post Wolcott, Photographer
Games at recess and lunch hour, as well as physical education classes, were an important part of the one-room school. In summer, there were games like softball, kick the can, ante-I-over, hide-and-seek, and red-light/green-light. In the winter there was ice for sliding, skating or shinny, and hills for sleighing. On cold or stormy days there were indoor games such as checkers, snakes-and-ladders, and charades. Special occasions were observed in the one-room schools. On Hallowe’en night there was usually a party for children, involving costumes and contests. For weeks before Christmas the teacher and students practiced plays, poems and songs in preparation for an elaborate concert that was performed for the whole community.
In the 1940s, as people started to move into cities, buy cars, and change their ideas about education, the one-room schools started to disappear.
If you’d like to know more about one-room schools all over Canada, and see photographs and plans of the schools, check out this link to Libraries and Archives Canada’s Virtual Schoolhouse site:
http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/schoolhouse/008003-2200-e.html
Or watch this short video about a one room school museum in Edmonton:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ojCD9W3c28
ACTIVITY: One-Room Schoolhouse Improvisation
Set up your classroom as closely as you can to what you see in the photograph of the one-room school. Decide where the stove is, where the cloak room, where the wood pile and the water bucket would be.
Prepare to spend an entire period of pretending to be students and the teacher in one-room school. This kind of ongoing pretend, in which you try to remain in character, and react as authentically as you can to what other members of the group are doing, is called an improvisation. To get ready for the improvisation (and this may take a few days ahead of time) each student should figure out which member of the one-room schoolhouse they are going to be, and start to build some background information for that character, or a “back-story”. Most of you will play students for your one-room school, ranging in age from 5 to 16. You need to figure out how old your character is going to be and make sure that there's a good mix of ages for your improvisation’s characters. You may wish to have more than one person prepare to play a teacher – and take turns over the hour. The teachers should also know what age they are going to pretend to be, whether they are from the community, or from away, and how strict or easy-going they are. One student may wish to prepare the character of the Inspector of Schools, and show up unexpectedly sometime during the hour to check up on the teacher's progress. Or some of you may want to prepare the role of someone’s parent – perhaps coming to take one of the older boys out of school to work on the farm, or to talk to the teacher.
Check the websites provided in this section about one-room schoolhouses to give you information about how to build your character's back-story. Or try searching “one-room schoolhouse in Canada” with a search engine, and you will find much more information.
You can also try this activity after you have seen the play Schoolhouse, and take on the roles of the characters in the play.
When preparing your characters, after you have figured out what your role is in the school, what your age you are, and if you are the teacher, what subject you are going to try to teach to which age group, also make notes about what kind of person you are. If you are one of the children, decide if you are going to be a good student, or a student who is often in trouble, kind, or not so kind, happy, gloomy, with lots of friends, or lonely. Go into as much detail as you can on your back-story, and write it down for sharing with the rest of the class before you begin the improvisation. The more you know about the person you are pretending to be, the more you can contribute improvisation, and more fun it will be.
If you want to make the improvisation more structured, you can write down series of events that could happen in the school like “student looses garter snake in the room”, “youngest student gets sick”, “two students get into a fight”, “spelling Bee”, “blizzard”, “fire goes out”, put them on separate pieces of paper, in a hat or other container. Any time someone feels that the classroom improvisation needs a new event to remain interesting, he or she can choose to draw an event “card”. Everyone must pretend that the event occurred, and react accordingly.
If you have access to a video camera, you can also ask someone in your class to act as the videographer of your improvisation, so you can watch your “one-room schoolhouse” again.
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